Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

If your are citing books and you are sick of creating the BibTex data for yourself: Cheer up, there is a easy way to get the data created. You just have to get the ISBN Number of the book (easiest by finding the book on wikipedia). Then you use the OttoBib webservice. Just replace the ISBN number in this example

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software is a new book by Christopher Kelty that explores the “history and cultural significance of Free Software”, narrating a time line about “the people and practices that have transformed not only software, but also music, film, science, and education” in contemporary society. Released in print by Duke University Press, Two Bits is also licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license, making the text remixable, reusable, and in general more fluid.

LegalTorrents, “an online community created to discover and distribute Creative Commons licensed digital media”, has re-launched in exciting fashion. Originally founded in 2003 as a means to distribute “hand-picked .torrent files that were approved by content owners“, LegalTorrents revamped its infrastructure to be more friendly to content creators looking to spread their works far and wide, a goal which included a clear articulation of CC-licenses in relation to relevant torrent files. [More Information…]

If you are interested about information how you can build and maintain wireless networks in developing countries, you may be interested in the bookWireless Networking in the Developing World. This book explains this on about 425 pages.

With the advent of more ebook reading devices, sites like Manybooks.net are providing a useful service in transforming digital materials into a variety of electronic formats that can be read by several different ebook readers and mobile devices. All of the 19,000+ ebooks on Manybooks are available for free. Many works are originally sourced from Project Gutenberg, a longstanding project to release books in the public domain as digital texts.

This means all four of my books are now CC licensed. Code (v1) was licensed under a BY-SA license; so too, Code (v2). And Free Culture and now The Future of Ideas are licensed under BY-NC licenses.

In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect. The explosion of innovation we have seen in the environment of the Internet was not conjured from some new, previously unimagined technological magic; instead, it came from an ideal as old as the nation. Creativity flourished there because the Internet protected an innovation commons. The Internet’s very design built a neutral platform upon which the widest range of creators could experiment. The legal architecture surrounding it protected this free space so that culture and information–the ideas of our era–could flow freely and inspire an unprecedented breadth of expression. But this structural design is changing–both legally and technically.

“…the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them. After all, literally hundreds of thousands of new titles come out every year, and only a few hundred writers in the entire United States (if that many) actually live off their books full time. So, by giving away the book, I hope more people actually read it.”